An ancient language form that originated
in the North African area of our most ancient civilizations has been studied
by Nyland
(2001).He found that many words used
to describe names of places and things in Eskimo languages seem to be closely
related to the ancient language, which Nyland called Saharan, and whichlater was predated by the Igbo Language of West Africa.Fortuitously, the Basque Language is a close relative to
the original Saharan.Following is a discussion of this relationship:

It has been claimed that there are many
names in use by the Eskimo people of Arctic Canada that appear to be related
to Basque Nyland (2001). The land north of
the tree line is called Ungava,
which in Basque would be Ungaba, Unagaba. Many Basque names are assembled
from several words by agglutinating the first letters of these words. Unagaba
sounded like it came from unagarri (boring) gaba (night). Calling the long, dark, northern night, a "boring
night" made very good sense, but the apparent relationship with Basque
seemed to be accidental. The North American reindeer is called "caribou", spelled karibu in
Basque; from kari-bu, kari (reason, purpose, destination) burdun (roasting spit):
"Destination roasting spit" again made good sense. The indigenous
people of the Arctic call themselves the Dene; dena in Basque means "all
of us" and is the same word as in Denmark. Having been alerted to the
possibility of an unsuspected and unlikely link between Europe and the
eternally frozen land of the Eskimos, Nyland looked for a possible path the
Eskimo language could have taken. Both the names Alaska and Canada looked
promising; Alaska, alas-ka, from alatz (miracles) -ka (suffix denoting continuous action, unending), "Miracles
unending" is exactly the reason why so many tourist ships cruise along
the Alaska coast. Canada, spelled Kanada in Basque, clearly is assembled with
the vowel-interlocking formula: .ka-ana-ada, akabu (ultimate, extreme end) anaitu (to get together) ada (noise of...),

"At the far end we'll have
a noisy-get-together" i.e. "On the other side we'll have a
party".

In
the far northern village of Old Crow lives a native woman who writes a
regular newspaper column about life in the far north. She is no Eskimo but
her people have been living side-by-side with them, possibly for millennia.
Her name is Edith Josie; the Basque word josi means "to sew"
and that was exactly what she was doing when Nyland first met her. She was
embroidering a pair of beautiful mukluks for one of the caribou hunters while
Nyland told her about the Canadian government's plans to build a
forest-ranger station (conservation officer) in her village. Not all these
Basque connections in the Arctic could be accidental. What was going on here?

The following may sound
implausible, but this is how Edo Nyland believes it could have happened. To
answer the above question, it is necessary to dig deep into the origin of the
"Basque" language. The story started during the Ice Age, which had
peaked 16,000 bce. (see Climate) The melting of the massive glaciers covering the Alps had
caused profound changes in air-circulation over North Africa. It is estimated
that by 10,000 bce. the effect was starting to be felt by the people living
in the central Sahara. By 8,000 bce. the increasingly dry conditions caused
serious droughts there, and by 5,000 bce. the tribes living in the affected
areas had to escape to the shores of Africa, the higher elevation areas and
the major river valleys like the Senegal, Niger and Nile.

Tribes that had
traditionally lived along the ocean shores of the Sahara had long been
involved in long distance ocean travel and had discovered many lands. They
were also developing star navigation into a science.While bringing this into practice, they
were well on their way to discover all the continents of the world, with the
likely exception of Antarctica. By the time the refugees from the central
Sahara reached the coast, the Sea Peoples living there were ready to ferry them to new homes on the north
coast of the Mediterranean and to the fertile and beautiful lands around the
Black Sea, especially the Danube and Dnepr River valleys and also the
Caucasus region. The seafarers living along the coasts of Arabia and
Mesopotamia had scouted out the entire south coast of Asia and discovered
Indonesia, Formosa (Taiwan) and the Japanese islands.

Around 6,000 bce., a
Caucasian-like tribe which became the Ainu of Japan probably sailed, probably
from the mouth of the Euphrates river, to settle on one or more of the
beautiful and richly forested islands of Japan (see Sea Peoples). A risky migration required a strong commitment of support from
the people back in Mesopotamia. There may have been a good reason for this
particular group to migrate so far away. The Ainu had adhered to the
extremely ancient religion of the bear worshippers, evidence of which has
been found as far back as 200,000 bce. [This date certainly involved a
precursor of Homo sapiens -- email].Changing times and
religion in Mesopotamia may have caused them to leave civilization to seek a country
where they could practice their bear sacrifices without obstruction. Trade
prospects may have had something to do with the support they received from
the mercantile class back home. The Japanese islands, which were already
sparsely populated, must have appealed to these intrepid pioneers. The
newcomers, with their superior technical and linguistic skills taught their
Saharan language, boat building, leather tanning, ocean navigation etc. to
the native population with whom they appear to have been on generally good
terms.

The long ocean voyages
necessary to stay in touch with the homeland, as well as their long discovery
trips in the Pacific, required an active boat-building and sail-making
industry. Wood was no problem in Japan, the country was full of it in all
sizes and qualities. The problem was skins for sails. These people were still
hunter-gatherers and wove no cloth, so leather was the best alternative. Back
home in the Sahara, this problem had been solved by the Berbers who set up a
large hunting camp in Arctic Norway near Mount Komsa in Finnmark around 8,000
bce.There they annually took large
numbers of reindeer out of the herds migrating through the area and sent the
skins to the oak forests of southern Sweden and Conamara in Ireland for
tanning with oak bark. This example was followed by the Ainu whose scouts had
discovered the astonishing wildlife riches of Alaska, especially the many
herds of caribou migrating through Alaska and the Yukon.Their numbers were in the hundreds of
thousands. Camps were established in the arctic tundra of Alaska and the hunt
began. The skins were either tanned locally with the brain of the killed
animals, or taken back to Japan and possibly Korea for bark tanning. Thus
equipped they explored everywhere and it is likely that the west coast of
North America was discovered by Caucasian type people long before the east
coast was. It is well possible that the west coast of America was reached by
8,000 bce. [see Climate for conditions at the time]

The hunters, who later
became the Eskimos, do not appear to have established a religious center
similar to Mount Komsain the Norwegian Arctic. The
people involved in this hard work were mostly the native population of the
Aleutian Islands, who did not share exactly the same religious traditions
with the Ainu. However, both the Ainu and the Eskimos practiced the ancient
religion of the Goddess, who represented the life-generating and nurturing powers of the
earth.In other words, the Goddess
was nature as created and sustained by the living earth. To the Ainu black
was the color of life, the rich black soil that sustained all living things
and in itself was alive. Black was also the holy darkness of the sacred cave,
regarded as the womb of the Goddess, the central point of their worship.
However, the eternally frozen earth of the Arctic and the absence of caves
was not representative of the Goddess and thus required an adaptation in
belief. In the Arctic it was not the land, but the ocean which was vibrantly
alive and which provided all the riches necessary to sustain life in the far
north. To this day some Eskimo elders teach that the Goddess "Sedna"
lives at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean.The Goddess controls the seals, the Beluga whales, the arctic char
swimming up the rivers to spawn, the drifting ice floes and the winter
storms. In Alaska, this Goddess is known as Nulirahak and in the Central
Canadian Arctic as Nuliaguk.
The Eskimo did not worship her exactly as the Ainu did, but they had great
respect for her, trying to secure her cooperation and goodwill by persuasion
and sometimes by threats.

There is little doubt that
some Ainu individuals were among the hunters and that Ainu blood became mixed
in during the long and dreary Arctic nights. Although living conditions were
difficult, once the housing and travel problems had been solved the
population thrived because there was abundant food in the ocean. The skin
boat technology developed by the Sea Peoples of North Africa was adapted to arctic conditions by the Eskimos
and has been maintained up to now, both for the one-man kayakand
for the large family boat, the umiak. As the population grew, the people became more
confident of their ability to cope with the extremely uncooperative climate
and the annually repeated extended periods of darkness.Then the population spread ever farther
eastward until they had populated the entire arctic coast of North America
from the Bering Strait to Labrador and Greenland, where they met seafarers
speaking Basque. To the surprise of the Basques they found they could communicate
with the Eskimos to some extent. The language had traveled clear around the
earth, carried by population migration. No people on earth ever had to do
more creative adapting to their environment than the Eskimos.

It must be clear by now that
the language at the root of the Eskimo language cannot be Basque because
these seafarers were never active in the northern Pacific. Instead, the
relationship lies with the Saharan language from which Ainu, Basque, Eskimo and a host of other
languages derive. The name Inuit,
which many Eskimos prefer for themselves, may come from inu-it, inular (sunset, low-angle sun) itsu (blind), sun-reflection
blindness, or "snow-blind". Their reputation of staunch
independence and high self-esteem may have given the Eskimos their name
"ezki-mo", from ezkibel (easily offended) molde (manner, behaviour), "They are easily offended" a name
likely given to them by the Basques in Labrador.

For at least 500 years, the
Basques have been fishing the Grand Banks of Newfoundland for cod, while
their whalers were actively harpooning off Labrador. Many early visitors had
commented over the years that the indigenous people living south of the St
Lawrence estuary and the Eskimos living to the north used a Basque pidgin
language to communicate with the visitors. The pidgin's existence was
explained by the many years of contact with Basque fishermen and whalers.
This could have been the case with the indigenous people. However, the
Eskimos, generally, kept their distance and avoided unnecessary contact. Yet,
they could also talk with the Basques.

A linguist from the University of Amsterdam, Peter Bakker,
documented historical and linguistic evidence of the Basque elements he found
in the pidgin and published this in the fall 1989 issue of
"Anthropological Linguistics". His article was entitled "The
Language of the Coast Tribes is Half Basque", which was an exaggeration
because he gave only a handful of examples. Edo Nyland suggested to him that
he could have found many more Basque-related words in the Eskimo language
spoken all the way to Alaska, thousands of miles to the west, but he wouldn't
hear of it. This left Nyland no choice but to document the existence of
Basque throughout the range of the Eskimo language and to provide an
explanation for this startling phenomenon.

To show that Basque vocabulary can also be recognized in the high
Western Arctic, where no other races ever came, Nyland examined two
dictionaries for Basque-related words. He could not have found a more
isolated and unaffected part in the north:

1) The "Kangiryuarmiut" dialect, spoken in Holman on
Victoria Island; published 1983.

2) The "Siglit Inuvialuit" dialect spoken in Aklavik,
Paulatuk and in Sachs Harbor on Banks Island; published in 1984.

Both dictionaries were written by Ronald Lowe of Laval University
and were published by the Committee for Original

Linguists have been at a
loss to explain the development of the language. The Eskimo people have a
rather small population, totaling about 100,000 in 2004. These are scattered
over an enormous area from Eastern Siberia to Greenland. The number and
diversity of Eskimo dialects and sub-dialects surely points to centuries, if
not millennia, of groups living in isolation. Even dialects spoken in
relatively close proximity, such as the two named above, show extreme
differences. Ronald Lowe writes about one of them: "Siglitun seems to
belong to no recognized family of Eskimo dialects and its loss would mean the
permanent loss to the Eskimo language of those characteristics that are
uniquely Sigliq". The speakers often have difficulty communicating with
nearby tribes. Therefore, it is surprising that some Eskimo words like amaruq
(wolf) have survived almost unaltered through the millennia; in Basque the
word amarruki means "cunningly". Another obvious one isaqittuq (weak), in Basque akitu(tired); also ipun (ear) and ipuin (story).

There
is a clear difference in pronunciation between k and q; the q is a uvular stop sound, pronounced like a k but much farther back in the throat. The r sounds like the French uvular r. The g is pronounced halfway between h and g. The l is more like the French l.

During the
thousands of years that the Eskimo have lived in the Arctic, they have
created a very special society in a most hostile environment. Their
civilization and art are so unique that nothing on earth compares with
it.Therefore, it is not surprising
that it is a more time-consuming process to find Basque-related words in the
Eskimo language than in the Ainu language. As the Saharan
Language was introduced to the people who later became Eskimos, the Ainu
people, of northern Japan, must have brought those words that still resemble
Basque to them at a very early time. Trying to show this relationship has
been a rather time-consuming task. To finish the above comparison would be a
good project for a linguistics student.We know that about 2,000 bce seafarers from Japan visited South
America in the area that is now Ecuador.This is because advanced Japanese style pottery made its appearance in
Ecuador around that time.That improved
technology then spread rapidly
throughout the Americas.